Robin Williams

I walked into the house on Monday night and Carol asked if I had been listening to a CD in the car or did I have the radio on.

She knew that if I had the radio on I had probably heard the news. But I had just turned it on during the last five minutes of my drive.

She told me that Robin Williams was dead. Suicide.

I was stunned and stood in front of the TV for the next fifteen minutes watching the coverage.

I was stunned but not surprised. If you asked me 20 years ago if Robin Williams was a candidate for suicide I would have said yes. Definitely.

He was obviously a sensitive soul. I also felt he was a tortured soul.

I was stunned, then I became furious. Furious because the world does not need one less sensitive soul. The world needs more sensitive souls. Many more sensitive souls.

I am tired of life destroying people who are all about emotion. People who feel, above and beyond any other thought process or reaction or mode of existence.

Life is a snarling beast. It forces us to adapt by becoming stage actors, by becoming colder, by curling our emotions up like a fetus and wrapping them in false bravado.

We pretend to be tough when all we really ever are is vulnerable.

Some people just cannot live that way.

We are born innocent and wide eyed. All about love and sensitivity and wonder.

Otherwise known as the natural human condition.

As we stumble through life we develop defense mechanisms that bury our essence. Defense and coping mechanisms born of the realization that life will never be what we thought it would be. That we will never have the life we want. That life will be spent pointlessly working at hated jobs, and suffering and worrying endlessly about mortgage payments and budgets.

Defense and coping mechanisms born of the realization that you cannot trust most people. That everyone is so lost and hurt that they will not hesitate to hurt you.

We put our heads down and say "this is how life is."

Some people just cannot live that way.

People loved Robin Williams precisely because of his sensitivity. He made people laugh. He was crazy like we all want to be crazy. He helped us forget about our own lives every once in a while.

But it was the sensitivity that shone through. Even at his most manic, you could just see it in his face. His body language. His tone of voice.

There was a gentleness there that hooked us like heroin.

I am sure that gentleness is what killed him.

You can get cynical and ask what the hell did Robin Williams have to be depressed about? Most of us would kill to have his life.

That point of view is small minded. It expresses the age old confusion between "success" and happiness.

Happiness is in the head. Period.

You can have everything in the world and still not be happy. Depressed over the state of the world, depressed over the way life works, depressed over the way people behave.

Because when you are achingly sensitive, everything bad hurts. Whether it is personal or whether it is global.

I am sick and fucking tired of watching sensitive people - real people - get destroyed by life. Because these are the only people who have something genuine to offer us.

I am sick and fucking tired of it because I know this evil beast called life will always win.

We have devolved into a heartless species that devours gentleness. That mocks sensitivity.

Thank God for the years we had to enjoy Robin Williams. There were so many times he brought my own sensitivity to the surface, in his stand up, in his movies, in interviews. Brought my sensitivity to the surface, bloodied and diseased as it is, and allowed it to breath. Allowed it to just be.

There were countless times when Robin Williams caused tears to run down my cheeks.

Tears. An outward expression of the most basic, most vulnerable in all of us.

We loved Robin Williams because he touched what is real in all of us. He forced us, through the sheer power of genuineness, to recognize just how lost we all are.

He is being universally mourned because we know we have lost a soul that the world desperately needs.

I am sick and fucking tired of sensitive souls being snuffed out by the bastardized version of life that we have created.

I never met Robin Williams, but I loved him.

I'm pretty sure you feel the same way.